OSEHRA to Support VA-PALS Open Source Project

Last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced their partnership and participation in the Implementation Network for the VA-Partnership to increase Access to Lung Screening, or VA-PALS. As described in their Press Release, this three-year project, funded by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, is a groundbreaking strategy to deploy VistA based lung cancer screening management software at 10 VA Medical Centers.

The VA-PALS Implementation Network includes Paraxial and the VistA Expertise Network, two software development organizations with long standing relationships with OSEHRA. The VA-PALS Implementation Network is now working with OSEHRA to develop VA-PALS software as an OSEHRA Open Source Project and take advantage of our infrastructure and community to demonstrate the power of open source and real collaborative development. Work is now under way to set up a development environment and repository structure to accommodate the project. The first project call has been scheduled for Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 1:00PM Eastern Time, and calls will continue each week in that time slot. Anyone wishing to participate should register using the VA-PALS Project Group Page on the OSEHRA website.

Finally, we want the entire community to receive the full details on this exciting open source initiative. To that end, we’re going to dedicate our September Innovation Webinar (Tuesday, September 19 at 3PM Eastern) to VA-PALS. Paraxial and VEN will provide a project overview and answer questions on how the community can participate. Please register here and join us as we kick off a new and high-profile open source project!